


The Vastness of The Void

by PresquePommes



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU: Space Station, Also it will feature zero gravity three-dimensional maneuver gear use, Cannibalism, Fair warning!, If I actually continue this it will probably be Eren/Levi, Neurotech babble, Psychosis, because that's awesome, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 16:57:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For hundreds of years, they had insisted that a breach was impossible, and at some point within the last century, they’d actually started to believe that it could be true. </p><p>The circumstances surrounding the fall of Earth had faded into relative obscurity, and with them, so had humanity’s sense of urgency, of dislocation, of planetside belonging. After the last of those who had survived the fall had died, what they left behind was an Earthless humanity, further removed from its roots with each passing generation.</p><p>The impossible would happen faster than anyone could have foreseen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Vastness of The Void

**Author's Note:**

> I like science-fiction. I wrote a science-fiction alternative universe SnK/AoT. That's what's up.
> 
> The neuromediators are neurological implants that everybody on board has- you get an external one as a baby, and then an implant as an adult. Or the station kills you as an unknown entity. That's also what's up. I wrote this on a whim. Because I like science-fiction.
> 
> Kind of a lot.

For hundreds of years, they had insisted that a breach was impossible, and at some point within the last century, they’d actually started to believe that it could be true.

The circumstances surrounding the fall of Earth had faded into relative obscurity, and with them, so had humanity’s sense of urgency, of dislocation, of planetside belonging. After the last of those who had survived the fall had died, what they left behind was an Earthless humanity, further removed from its roots with each passing generation.

The last generation to have forgotten the meaning of true fear would reside aboard a space station that saw fit to name its decks and its boundaries, but not itself, because the last human settlement in the known universe had nothing to see itself compared to in relative terms except for that which was not human, and even that had all but faded into myth.

The impossible would happen faster than anyone could have foreseen.

_(The Vastness of The Void)_

Like most catastrophes, none of them saw it coming.

Like most of his peers, ten-year-old Eren Jäger had spent his days relatively amicably- if, perhaps, less amicably than he could have.

He had lived on one of the Maria decks- the largest of the three station sections- in the Shiganshina subsection, one of only four subsections that existed adjacent to the exterior wall. He thought about that often. About outside. About Earth, just a speck below them, not quite forgotten.

On the last day of his childhood, Eren and his sometime-sister Mikasa had been gathering supplies from the hydroponics belt closest to their home, and it had been normal. Mikasa had done more, carried more, and they’d both known without saying that she was stronger than him, who sometimes took to napping in the green spaces between those carefully-maintained hydroponic gardens. This had also been normal.

On their way home, back through the tiered hyperglass and metal lobbies that connected commercial to residential to agricultural, the external klaxon had sounded, signalling that the airlocks were being engaged, and they had joined the others to welcome the Scouting Legion back from their brief foray outside the walls- and the _Walls_ , those ever-important matriarchs, the omnipresent protectors of humanity’s last- both too young to read the exhaustion in the faces of those who remained and too passionate to recognize the merit in the words slung by their detractors. And this, too, had been normal.

Eren had seen the face of his heroes- of everyone’s heroes, in his estimation- and he had declared it proudly to the crowd around him. Less than flattering words had followed, and Eren had struck out. Mikasa had saved them both from the equal fury of a larger person, but Eren’s words had still rung proudly in his own ears.

Eren had wanted to join the Scouting Legion. Eren had always wanted to see what was outside of the windowless world he lived in. Mikasa knew.

When Mikasa told his parents, he called her a traitor, but there was no real venom behind the words. He knew she was worried. He also knew she couldn’t stop him. He knew that with the unquestionable, directionless fire of the naturally passionate. Carla, his mother, despised the idea. Grisha, his father, was a mystery, and his parting words before he left would remain a mystery for years to follow. He left an image of a keycode on Eren’s neuromediator. It would be Eren’s only heirloom.

But today, they’d gathered. They’d eaten. They argued. They were normal.

They’d fought, finding Armin- the smallest, the smartest, the brightest star this side of that which separated Shiganshina from the void- at the centre of trouble again.

Armin wanted more than to just see outside. Armin wanted to see Earth. Armin talked about hills that spat fire and endless expanses of sand and water and ice. Armin talked about green spaces in which the trees grew to unimaginable heights because they didn’t have to be regulated, because there was no worrying about upsetting the delicate balance that made sure that most of the station would have something to eat at the end of the day, that there would food on most tables when everyone’s neuromediators signalled that it was only three hours until lights out.

Armin made enemies, talking like that. Eren tried to defend him, and failed. Mikasa tried to defend the both of them, and didn’t.

It was all very normal.

And then it wasn’t.

The felt it creeping on the inside, like an explosion and a burst of air that hadn’t really happened but _had_ happened nonetheless.

Through the gauzy filter of their neuromediators, each and every one of them saw the other like a warm, human-shaped blue blur, and felt Maria protecting them from the reaching fingers of their half-forgotten boogeymen outside. Eren had heard that there were people in Wall Sina who lived their daily lives with their eyes closed, relying on Sina’s gentle guidance to navigate the softly glowing map of obstacles and others they all carried behind their eyes.

He thought those people were pretty stupid, and that people had eyes for a reason.

Now, he saw things, and everything was _wrong_.

There was a gap.

There was a gap in Wall Maria.

They all felt it.

It wasn’t a physical gap. The exterior wall was intact. They were still separated from the void. The air was still, lukewarm and stagnant, just like always.

But there was a gap, and air was rushing past them and Eren saw _red_ behind his eyes, purple and red and everything was _wrong._

He reeled as Armin’s pupils contracted into pinpoints of fear.

“My mom is back there,” he gasped desperately, feeling for her, looking for her through too much metallic interference and beginning to panic, and he ran, and Mikasa ran, and Armin ran in the opposite direction. It was a momentary betrayal.

Carla was already being _accessed_ when they found her. She was purpling behind their eyes, and twitching with pain in front of them.

“We’ll get you out of here,” Eren had insisted, and Carla had argued. She felt the shadow of something bigger, something indescribable, coming for them, and they did too.

When Hannes had arrived, he, too, had felt its magnitude, and he had feared.

Eren had struggled when Hannes had lifted him and his sister from the ground and begun to run. Behind him, he saw his mother toggle her neuromediator’s release mechanism, and he saw the station strike her down as an unknown entity. He would later learn that it was a quick death, a merciful death, but it was not a death he could appreciate as such at the time.

The horizon was an expanse of red, dotted with purple, consuming, eating alive what little hazy wisps of blue remained. They fled past people having convulsions, people who had already died, and people who were eating the dead.

People who were eating those who weren’t quite dead yet, or really weren’t dead at all.

Red consuming purple consuming blue, ephemeral, impressionistic, and somehow more horrible than the atrocities laid immediately before them simply for the sweeping and inarguable picture of what was happening that it provided.

Armin was waiting for them when Hannes shoved them into the meagre space available in the last of the inter-deck station evacuation cars, and Eren dimly, hysterically, registered that it smelled of fear and sweat and _beets_. They had been using them for food transport. They’d forgotten their originally purpose.

As the car descended, Eren stared sightlessly at the halo of red receding behind them.

“I’ll wipe them all out,” he murmured to himself, inaudible over the broken sobbing that echoed around him, numb and hypersensitive and furious and nothing at all, “I’ll erase them from reality.”

Even when he screamed “ _I won’t leave a single one left!”_ no one but Mikasa heard him.

_(The Vastness of The Void)_

He had to wait longer than he would have liked to join the station’s military training program.

He understood, theoretically, that it was because persons under the age of seventeen did not have the neurological stability to fully utilize the neuromediator’s additional equipment- the famed, or perhaps, infamous, three-dimensional maneuver gear was accessible to all military candidates, but Cognitive Resistance Training Technology was too precious to waste on an underdeveloped brain- and so there was no point in allowing a person under the age of thirteen join the four-year-long intensive training that would put him on the front lines, where he wanted to be- close to the _titans_.

The word was old, and it had fallen into disuse until the events that had occurred seven years prior. Once they’d seen them, they’d all understood.

Though intangible, the menace of the titans was implicit in their enormous size, and those who were _accessed_ by them suffered a variety of fates, the most common amongst them catatonia, convulsions, heart failure and, worst of all, psychosis characterized by sudden cannibalistic tendencies.

The last was one none of them could explain. It seemed like a sick joke the titans were playing on them. Their neuromediators had coercive abilities, after all, and there was no telling how a person would react to commands as alien as those that titans exuded. It took a great deal of willpower to resist, even on the borders of a titan’s presence, and it almost inevitably took more than one person to dissolve a titan’s presence, even with the assistance of CITT.

It should have been simpler than it was.

Eren’s mind was always running in circles, but Armin, brighter than he, had already worked his way down the list of why nothing else would work.

Why they couldn’t go home.

They had all asked themselves why they simply couldn’t disengage their neuromediators and be free from the menace of the titans altogether, and the answer was simple: their neuromediators made them real in the eyes of their home. Anything unreal was an invasive presence. Invasive presences were terminated, unless, of course, they were titans, which the ship could not register. Only the Walls could see the titans, and only the Walls could keep them out.

And they’d breached Wall Maria.

Twice.

It still seemed impossible.

They asked themselves why they couldn’t just vent the Maria decks, and the answer was even simpler: they couldn’t afford the air loss, and they couldn’t afford the loss of the Maria’s ample green space. They could keep the air clean, even with the decomposition that had to be occurring above them, but to lose the air was to lose the Maria decks forever.

And they weren’t even sure that venting the decks would remove the titans, anyway. The more they encountered them, the more they realized that they knew nothing about them.

Some people questioned whether or not they were even there in any way humanity could truly comprehend.

It was a terrifying predicament.

When they had sent Maria’s survivors back out in a slaughter they politely called a reclamation effort, it had been because they couldn’t afford to lose the Maria decks.

They couldn’t feed themselves without them, and even with that awful sacrifice, the day would soon come where they wouldn’t be able to feed themselves again.

Suddenly, the titans were real again.

They were exciting to those who hadn’t seen them.

They were terrifying to some of those who had.

And others, like Eren, went mad with rage at the first sign of red lingering behind the seeing parts of their eyes.


End file.
